J. L. Austin Quotes

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Truth is in things, and not in words.

If somebody writes clearly, you can pretty much tell immediately if something is shallow or deep, whereas if they write with all this duckweed on the surface, you can't tell if the stream is one inch deep or a hundred fathoms.

Everything deep is also simple and can be reproduced simply as long as its reference to the whole truth is maintained. But what matters is not what is witty but what is true.

Give me truths for I am weary of the surfaces.

Language is the house of the truth of Being.

Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn't mean it is simple.

Facts are many, but the truth is one.

I'd hate it to become style over substance, I'd hate people to start putting me in a magazine article about my style. I don't like dressing up in something I'm not necessarily comfortable in just to make it more of a show. I want the power to come from what I sing about and how I sing.

Exactitude is not truth.

You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.

Truth is something which can't be told in a few words. Those who simplify the universe only reduce the expansion of its meaning.

Your aim as a photographer is to get a picture of that person that means something. Portraits aren't fantasies; they need to tell a truth.

Words are men's daughters, but God's sons are things.

Falsehood has an infinity of combinations, but truth has only one mode of being.

Sometimes the truth is more than the sum of the facts.

This time it is the truth.

They were giving the substance of truth to what we were dreaming.

Nature admits no lie.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, so they use them with care, with thought, with delight.

Facts are often complicated.

The truth is ever best.

I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.

Rhetoric is no substitute for reality.

Truth is not so threadbare as speech, because fewer people can make use of it.